The methods to assess the customer service experience

"The good customer service experience does not happen by accident, it happens by design and care"

Have you wondered how the big companies reach success? You may see the customers happy and satisfy with their services. On the other side, the companies meet their bottom lines which are profits and business expansion and extension. 

Do you think a good customer service experience just happens like that? The answer is "No", all are made with design and having strong strategies to track the needs, wants, and thus the demands of the customers.

If you have a company whether you are self-employed or a CEO of a company, you wonder how to improve the quality of your services and to make your customers happier. This present article is for you.

What do you understand by customer service?

If you search on Google, you obviously find a lot of definitions to explain the meaning of these terms "customer service". From my own experience,  customer service consists of interacting and servicing customers based on the queries. It involves responding to their demands, needs, and wants. A good company must know to identify the needs and wants of the customers to meet their expectations. 

Like Steve Jobs, Founder of Apple said “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close, that you will tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves”. 

This emphasizes that a strong company must have great customer service. However, the smart company will always probe into how should be improved to attract and retain customers; to present what is good for them, and to be attentive to their concerns in a view to satisfy their needs as well as to add value to the business and help the company to meet the bottom lines.

Customer service is considered an important core of business activities and strategies. Without customers or buyers, the business cannot expand and generate profits. It is, therefore, necessary to put forward some strategies to deal with your customers to meet their needs, and wants as well as their expectations. 

The methods to assess customer service experience

I consider the following methods to assess customer service experience: 

• Getting feedback through complaints - you can assess your customer service associated with the complaints. In your business, you may receive a lot of complaints relating to your services and staff. Hence, if you want to promote a change, and make your business successful, to stand out against the competitors. It is important for you to analyze the current situation as well as establishing a better plan for better improvement of the quality of services and other concerns.

• Direct customer feedback through surveys and questionnaires - you can ask your, customers to complete a quick survey and questionnaire to express their opinions and discontent about your services and provide suggestions if necessary. This is a common method that most companies use to evaluate their services to know whether or not the customers are satisfied. It is also a very useful method as it gives a large opportunity to review your current plan, and thus to address the plan.

• Getting customers’ feedback through face to face conversation or meeting - interacting directly with the customers would help a lot to get feedback. It allows quick exchanges of responses; following this method you can think about how to improve your services. 

• Post-service rating - you can invite your customers to rate your services after each delivery of products. This method can apply in any kind of company which offers for instance the home delivery services. Otherwise, you can have an online post rating service such as sending the newsletter to your customer to invite them to leave feedback or rate the services.

• CSAT question - It consists of rating on customers’ satisfaction overall toward the service.

• Instant feedback from the website - like many e-commerce websites, the customers are allowed to post their feedback online whether positive or negative in a view to attracting new customers and thus to improve the quality of services. Google as well offers a free app so-called Google my Business, which allows customers to rate and leave feedback to the company.

• Customers review - most of the companies nowadays have their own websites wherein they make available for the customers a section to drop comments. Or if you do not have a website, but you use social media for your businesses such as Facebook. You can review your customers' comments or you enable the section "review" on Facebook so that they can rate and leave comments.

• Suggestion box - you can invite your customers to provide any feedback related to your services, staff, or other queries. From this point, you can analyze and identify the void and think about how to improve your way of doing things.

• Social media monitoring – it helps to understand what people or customers are saying about your products or services. It includes online analytics which is useful to collect data from social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, and more. There is also the buzz analysis which is basically monitoring the online forum, social networks, and blogs; and thus social media intelligence or SMI, large portion of companies use this tool to monitor the social media channels and interactions, for example, Keyhole.com

Conclusion

As we live in the fierce competition of the market industries, your main objectives are to generate profits and make all possibilities to make your business stand out against the competitors. By so doing, you have to take into consideration all aspects of your business to make it runs according to your plan, in particular, it is imperative to listen to your customers about what they need and want, and thus what to be done in order to meet their expectations. An instance of some issues, you have to think about the solution to make the situation "WIN, WIN". 

As mentioned along with this article the strategies that you can use to get closer to your customers, how you can assess if they are satisfied or not. The above methods will help you a lot to address your current situation and it gives you the opportunity to revise your plan.